Community Created Content For Tabletop Games

PACGSplashWow. This is HUGE.

Fans can now design, produce & SELL their own custom cards for the Pathfinder card game. Paizo has partnered with DriveThruCards (the print-on-demand card site that I’ve raved about here before), and have gone out of their way to address the major concerns raised by this massive shift, namely: unbalancing or poor game design, and content concerns (copyright and offensive content).

Kudos to Steve Wieck, the rest of the DriveThru crew and Paizo Publishing. This is a Big Deal.

Read Steve’s blog post for more details: OneBlogShelf: Community Created Content for Tabletop Games.

Oh, the possibilities…

SF Failing Science 101 (or, In Which Scott Lynch Is Awesome)

2013-MAR-Scott-Lynch-214x300Scott Lynch is a brilliant writer, and a friend. You probably know him best for his Gentlemen Bastards fantasy series (begun in The Lies of Locke Lamora… and if you haven’t read it, GET ON THAT), and he was also a contributor to the Tales of the Far West anthology that I edited and published.

Today on Twitter, he went on a bit of an extended ramble, and it struck me as just so damned smart that I felt the need to collect it. Hence, this blog post.

In the following series of tweets, Scott talks about the tendency of certain subsets of SF…

So the entire purpose of putting this on my blog is basically so that I can point to the above sequence and say “YEAH. THAT.”
 
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Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin I – Preview

33742c7dbc6e778f6cd290993b6612431416532911_largeHOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Origin is an awesome manga re-telling of the first Gundam story from the 70s, bringing the storytelling up from the kids-cartoon beginnings of the show, to the more in-depth and adult themes of later Gundam efforts. I’ve been reading it for a while, and really enjoying it.

You can imagine my glee when I heard that they were going to do a NEW OVA (Original Video Animation), adapting the ORIGIN manga. They just announced that Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin I: Aoi Hitomi no Casval (The Blue-Eyed Casval) will have its first episode screened at 13 selected theaters across Japan for limited time of two weeks from February 28 to March 13, 2015. And then be released to BluRay.

Here is a video with an (untranslated) couple of trailers — and a 7-minute preview (which is in English — they’re producing it in both languages, and I’ve put the English version here for folks who don’t like subtitling). All I can say is HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iIogZju9dw